Inbodied Interaction: 3 things you need to know about how your body works to lead HCI innovation.

From Ergonomics to Embodied interaction, the body is a fundamental locus of interaction in HCI research and design. In HCI the body and all its awesome complexity, however, is largely treated as a black box where we focus on designing around the constraints of its input and output. If we understand, for instance, how sleep affects ability to see errors, or how stress suppresses creativity or affects recall, or how social interaction with movement enhances insight, we can immediately begin to explore new kinds of design challenges to help us perform better from general to specific contexts: how would we design a tool that identifies sleep and stress patterns to prompt counter-intuitive but beneficial increase of social engagement prior to a critical deadline, for instance? In this course we explore how, by cracking the lid of the body black box via three accessible heuristics, we can address these new kinds of questions to enable us to innovate better designs for human performance and enhanced quality of life for all.